This is absolutely the best campaign platform ever:
Oscar Grant
A jury of Johannes Mehserle’s peers has declared him guilty in the death of Oscar Grant — but it comes with a very important caveat: “involuntary manslaughter.”
By all accounts this is a tremendous win for Mehserle, given that the maximum sentence is a mere fourteen years.
AlterNet readers will remember that Mehserle is the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) cop who shot transit rider and Oakland resident Oscar Grant execution-style on New Years Eve 2009. The atrocious crime was caught on video by a BART rider and the fall-out centered around issues like police brutality and race-baiting.
The jury — which comprised precisely zero African-Americans — was in Los Angeles. The trial was actually moved from the Bay Area to L.A. because of the immense publicity surrounding the case. And L.A. has a track record of siding with cops — the last time one was found guilty of murder was in 1983.
Many are expecting riots in downtown Oakland tonight although Oscar Grant’s family had asked for peace, regardless of the outcome. (Already, “Rodney King” is a trending topic on Twitter.)
I leave you with this:
How fun — years of oil rain to look forward to, courtesy of BP:
Oh, Arizona, how we wish we could ignore you — but how can we, when you keep pulling crazy shit like this?
The Arizona Republic reports that a Prescott, Ariz. elementary school principal ordered a public mural edited to “fix shading” in the faces of non-white children depicted in the artwork. Fix shading.
It gets worse:
The “Go on Green” mural, which covers two walls outside Miller Valley Elementary School, was designed to advertise a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation. It features portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure.
R.E. Wall, director of Prescott’s Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town’s most prominent intersections.
“We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars,” Wall said. “We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics).”
Wall said school Principal Jeff Lane pressed him to make the children’s faces appear happier and brighter.
“It is being lightened because of the controversy,” Wall said, adding that “they want it to look like the children are coming into light.” READ FULL POST
You know things are getting hairy when a government agency feels the need to go to Twitter to defend its actions.
That’s what happened this morning when I tweeted the fact that more peace activists were killed on the day of the flotilla attack, than Israelis have been killed by Gaza rockets in 10 years.
To my surprise, within minutes, @IsraelMFA, the official Twitter account run by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, directed a tweet at me that read: “more than four naval personnel were injured, some from gunfire and some from various other weapons.”
I tweeted back (in compressed format) that injured is the key word here. No Israeli soldiers died — no Israeli soldiers even sustained “serious” injuries — though they did leave at least nine peace activists lifeless.
The MFA’s tweet directed at me is no longer on their Twitter page. It was likely deleted because its blind-sided comment thoroughly proved my point. That’s how it goes in the world of propaganda — inconveniences are handily, quickly deleted.
Israel’s public relations/propaganda efforts are going at full blast as the IDF tries to justify why its commandos ambushed a flotilla of humanitarian civilians in international waters Sunday, leaving at least 9 of them dead.
On the Israel Defense Ministry’s official Flickr page, photos have been posted of weapons they say were seized from the peace activists’ flotilla headed to Gaza. Let’s take a look. READ FULL POST
Another day, another oil spill. And before you ask: Yes, BP is involved.
We’re only catching snippets of this breaking news, but the AP reports:
Alaska environmental officials say crude oil at a pump station of the trans-Alaska pipeline flowed into a tank and than a containment area when a valve failed to close.The quantity of the release into the containment area, a pad surrounded by berms and underlain with an impervious liner, was not immediately known,
The incident occurred Tuesday afternoon during a scheduled pipeline shutdown at Pump Station 9 near Fort Greely, about 100 miles south of Fairbanks.
Meanwhile, KTVA 11, Anchorage’s CBS affiliate says that the pipeline is 51% owned by BP. Workers have been evacuated due to the threat of explosion.
Updated (@ 5:32 pm PT): KTVA reports that “several thousands of barrels worth of oil have spilled at an Alyeska Pipeline pump station.” It appears the crude oil is flowing into a containment area with a capacity of 104,500 barrels.
State officials indicate that no environmental damage has been wreaked so far and so presumably we ought be thankful the spill occurred in a containment area, but the timing couldn’t be worse — for BP, that is.
Updated (@ 5:55 pm PT): Some background! BP has a terrible track record in Alaska.
The trans-Alaskan pipeline was completed in 1977 and is 800 miles long. BP owns the largest share of it — 51 percent — and the entire thing is managed by a management consortium known as Alyeska Pipeline Service Co.
The pipeline runs to Valdez — as in Exxon-Valdez, yes. (BP was involved in that mess but avoided a lot of the bad press Exxon faced because it settled out of court.)
More recently, in 2006, a pipeline managed by BP in Prudhoe Bay faced the following: “a badly corroded 34-inch-diameter pipeline (…) lost oil for at least five days before a worker driving down a nearby service road on March 2, 2006, smelled oil and spotted the spill, which covered at least two acres of tundra. At 200,000 gallons, it was the largest ever on the North Slope.”
The primaries last night are a reminder of how close we are to the mid-term elections in November. And as a wave of anti-establishment fervor is knocking old-timers out — see ya never, Arlen! — one wonders whether voters will also be looking for innovative ways to solve old problems.
Tax Cannabis, the largest-ever state-wide initiative to tax and regulate marijuana much the same way tobacco and alcohol are, is on the California ballot this year. As the state faces a burgeoning budget crisis — a $19 to $22 billion deficit, depending on whom you ask — the possibility of legalizing cannabis, (unofficially) the state’s largest cash crop, ought to seem pretty interesting to many who may not have considered it otherwise. READ FULL POST
Last week, I detailed the regulatory capture that paved the way to BP’s oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Among them are significant failures by the Interior Department, which oversees off-shore drilling. From my story:
…the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service [gave] Deepwater Horizon a “categorical exclusion” from the National Environmental Policy Act, almost exactly a year before it exploded. (…)
Ten years ago, there were already warnings that the backup systems on oil rigs that failed on Deepwater Horizon would be a problem. The Interior Department issued a “safety alert” but then left it up to oil companies to decide what kind of backup system to use. And in 2007, a government regulator from the same department downplayed the chances and impact of a spill like the one that occurred last month: “[B]lowouts are rare events and of short duration, potential impact to marine water quality are not expected to be significant.”
You’d think a huge regulatory magnifying lens would be placed over the Interior Dept. now given their tremendous failure to prevent the BP oil disaster, but here comes outrageous news that proves no lessons have been learned.
I’ve been following the fight to persuade the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate internet service providers and thereby ensure net neutrality (the principle that all Internet content must be treated equally by internet service providers, where no content is given preferential treatment by ISPs) for a few weeks now and have always come to you, readers, with somewhat sad news.
First, I wrote about how net neutrality was hanging by a thread when a federal judge ruled that the FCC didn’t have the authority to demand that Comcast not throttle, or slow down, certain types of content. But I was hopeful that the FCC would reclassify internet services such that they can regulate the industry much the same way they do telephone service. Then earlier this week I wrote about how it seemed the FCC was going to shy away from that option and cave to the telecommunications lobby and leave the industry unregulated.
Chin up, digital rights activists! It appears the FCC is doing – gasp! – the right thing.
